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If you're not interested in kingdom management, there is an "automatic" setting (not sure of the name) that does everything in your stead, and cannot destroy your kingdom, unless you don't do each chapter's quest and thus let your kingdom destroy itself due to utter negligence on your part.

Bluefrenzy, I don't understand your post. Could you explain what you mean, please ?

Sure, I split it in two parts.

First it's about how bad it looks to have to tell the players what is the critical solution to a game problem. That fact should rise several alarms:
1- There is a need to explain the players what is the best stategy to deal with the problem, probably because else, you fail. That's a problem of user experience in terms of communication or directly a gameplay problem.
2- There is an obvious critical path, which means the gameplay is not giving choice but to deal with the issues as scripted.
3- As a direct consequence, player agency is removed. I am not going to enter in game design jargon, but player agency is extremely important in any game, even more in role playing games.

On the second paragraph I am making reference to the player distribution according to the odds of having bad luck with the dice. The positive feedback loop implies that after certain number of bad rolls you are spiraling down faster and faster because of how the mechanics feedback the failures. This implies there is a point where the chances of recovering from a bad stroke are negligible.
So basically you can distribute all the player base according to the sucesses - failures. Basically there would be a gauss bell describing all the player's results. Since this is due to luck it will be normal to have the median of users in a certain ratio of successes and failures, but it also means there is a group of players in the above median part and another group under the median.
So, now we have the rules that feedbacks the iterations making it harder as the ratio decreases. There is a point where the benefits of winning and the punishment of failing balances out, but if you drop under this point it means recovery is going to take a series of good luck strokes to recover. Since the game feedbacks bad results it means as you get further away from that balance point the probabilities of failing in cascade increase exponentially. So basically, at any point in that gauss bell you can describe the probabilities of recovering or the inverse, failing.

The "only" thing you have to do is cross both graphs and you will end up with a percentage of players who will fail certainly due to bad luck. Multiply then for the number of players and you know the number of affected people for a bad luck. And my guess without making all those complex calculations due to my experience playing the game is that this percentage is large enough to be a real problem for a big quantity of players. Even if it's a 10% of the player base, over 100.000 people means there is more than 10.000 players doomed due to bad luck. I mean, what are the odds of failing your first 10 times in a row in a 50% chance game? Well, yeah, it's one in 1000. But when you have 100.000 players rolling 1000 times it means 10.000 players failed 10 times in a row. The same statistic says that at least 1 player got 16 failures in a row. And the game system doesn't handle those situations.

This issue does not matter for short games like in poker or, in this game itself, the individual combats. If you fail, you try again. But I don't think it's very welcome in 100 hour games. Everything listed in the OP sounds more like a patch over patch trying to deal with this reality.

And, following the mantra of "sticking to the pnp game", the job of the DM usually goes the other way around: the DM creates negative feedback loops (the more you get, the harder is to keep getting). When a DM "adjusts" the game on real time is most of the times creating a negative feedback loop. The more powerful the characters get, the harder the challenge. The more crippled the party is, the more stupid the enemies are. Because what matters in role playing games is player agency. What matters is the choices of the players and how those affects the outcomes. I think the kingdom management system doesn't translate very well to the computer.

Thank you for the detailed answer. I almost commented that too much reliance on luck has been a sorry part of D&D and a lot of other RPGs since the beginning, but you have addressed that as well, and the why it's not a good thing and how some DMs try to counter balance that. So, nothing remains to be said. Cudows. ;)

Thank you for the detailed answer. I almost commented that too much reliance on luck has been a sorry part of D&D and a lot of other RPGs since the beginning, but you have addressed that as well, and the why it's not a good thing and how some DMs try to counter balance that. So, nothing remains to be said. Cudows. ;)

Well, luck based events are not bad per se. It can create unpredictability, replay value up to some extent and it can be a game by itself. There are literally some game aesthetics revolving around this concept (hence, giving some explanation to why some people love lootboxes and trading card games). But in order for those mechanics to work you need them to be in the proper context and supported by other mechanics. Here, it doesn't. Just as an extremely obvious example here: you cannot dump 80 hours of gameplay just for another chance. Luck based gameplays are A) With permanent benefits (no cummulative loses), B) Short for obvious experience reasons. Else, your target is reduced to players who are willing to expend hundreds of hours for anothdr reroll, which, I guess is not such a huge base of players.

The kingdom management mechanics are broken as part of the current game. They might work better if the game was solely about kingdom management and you could finish the game in less than one hour (though it would require much more replay value) or it was a game about how long you can last without failing. But not in a game where between events you have to explore a mountain, complete a twenty room two floor dungen, defeat a double final boss, take decisions and return back crippled to town before you can check if your results were succesful or not. Certainly not a load game situation.

Although at first sight the map exploration has a good sinergy with the kingdom management due to the calendar system, it really is implying the longer you explore the kingdom, the worse the consequences of a bad roll because a reroll means losing explored areas, found items, other rolls inside those areas, xp and gold earned, level up configuration if proceed, and a large etc. And that doesn't even mean the reroll will suffice.

Worst of all, the game forces the worst events during the most heavy exploration parts. All those super hard events and a time constrain to complete the episode event makes it so the only option is to leave the advisors working while making the huge dungeons. And they are the hardest type of events so it's basically a FU in you face.

Although the overall idea is good, the execution is poorly designed as artificial difficulty. And that is a very good way of creating frustration rather than difficulty. And for a game designer is very important to know the difference between both. You might want a hard game but you don't want a frustrating one no matter who your target is.

If you're not interested in kingdom management, there is an "automatic" setting (not sure of the name) that does everything in your stead, and cannot destroy your kingdom, unless you don't do each chapter's quest and thus let your kingdom destroy itself due to utter negligence on your part.

Yes I'm aware of this, but I think what some people want is to actually be able to dabble in kingdom management, do the best they can, even make some mistakes and screwups, and still not have and be protected from game over. It's certainly what I would want, which is NOT automatic kingdom management.

it is a complete game mystery why some companion can not be advisor of some type even if they have good stat (linzy for regent or tristan as a priest)
it seems that a companion can not be advisor for different type
?? is it a hard link

?? is it a CHOICE or balance purpose if some advisor type companion/NPC (regent, +2 with octavia or valerie.) have lower stats than others advisor type (general +4 )

Many excellent points about Kingdom Management have been brought up here. I will focus on some areas that haven't really been discussed.

1. Quest/Kingdom management interaction. For example, I got the Project to find mention of Armag's tomb after I've already cleaned it out. This may have been addressed in the latest update, but the Project for a Trade Agreement with Pitax was still around after you annexed it.
2. The Kingdom status icons in the left upper part of the screen. You know, the ones that say "+1 to Warden for solving problems in the region." This is cool... but why do some have 5 identical icons for the same thing? I'm sure this is because each applies to a different region (+1 to Warden/Diplomat/etc for regions bordering Brevoy, for example). If 4 or 5 icons are needed for this, then each one should say which Region the bonus is applied to. Some of these icons don't actually tell you anything useful at all, like all the icons that appear after you've taken over Pitax (how great the Pitaxian fleet is, Annamede Belavarah runs the Academy of Fine Arts).
3. Advisor bonus to resolving events. There are a lot of modifiers to event resolution that have nothing to do with advisor primary stat, kingdom unrest level, and rank (see item 2). These should be available to see in the reported modifier when choosing an advisor to handle an event. Similarly, when an event has succeeded or failed, I want to be able to see the roll, just like we do with combat.
4. I consistently get the same event within a month of the previous identical event. There should be a year moratorium on the same event.
5. Once you've updated a region, I can't figure out from the map which region has been updated with what. Or if I mouse over a region on the map, it'd be really nice to know what upgrade was done or are still available. Many of the region updates don't have an associated icon that appears with all the other icons.
6. It's unclear whether upgrading artisan shops has an effect on the quality of equipment you get. I think there is, but i haven't totally investigated this. Well, the only way to upgrade a shop is to upgrade a village to a town... none can ever be upgraded more than once because no town with a artisan can be upgraded to a city (except for Irlene in the capital). Yet, there is still a supposed upgrade path in the zero likelihood that you do upgrade a town to a city.
7. I think it's cool that artisans can produce a variety of things, but I should also be able to request a weapon specific to my character. The artisan, wanting to appease the king, would also want to make a dueling sword for my Aldori Defender, because, what am I going to do with a magic fauchard or some other ridiculousness? At the simplest, artisans should query characters for weapon focus feats and make items oriented in that direction.
8. Visiting the throne room from an event card. The button should be labeled "Visit Throne Room" not "Visiting the Throne Room". Some events requiring you to visit the throne room don't have the button at all (e.g. events to discuss Bald Hilltop).
9. Claiming resources. The pay-off for the 15BP is hardly uniform and the incremental value to the kingdom is questionable in most cases.
10. Finally, and this is perhaps the biggest complaint I have with Kingdom Management... what's the point? Sure, I need to rank up advisors so the kingdom can survive kingdom threatening events. But you probably don't need to get them anywhere near rank X to do so. All the cool buildings you can build are only available in the end game. The first time I played through the game, I actually tried to have a balance of buildings in each settlement. This time, I gamed the system to give me the max boost in whatever kingdom stat I needed at the moment. That's hardly realistic. If you actually want a well thought out city, you have to tear everything down and plan out all your megabuildings. My suggestion, any village can be upgraded to town and city if you're willing to spend the BP. Region upgrades should give free awesome buildings supporting the theme of the upgrade (here's where knowing how you actually upgraded a region might be useful). All of this should be available earlier in the game.